'The Life Line': Out of the wreckage, a marine masterpiece

By Gwen ShriftStaff Writer

Tuesday

Sep 25, 2012 at 12:01 AMSep 25, 2012 at 3:00 AM

In its twin aspects of promise and terror, the sea was a focus of practical and emotional energy in the 19th century.

Aside from the reality that many people made their living from the sea, it also was the only highway between the old and new worlds. If you lived in America and wanted to go to Europe, or vice versa — and millions did — your only choice was an uncomfortable, dangerous, perhaps deadly sea passage.

The Atlantic Ocean made the nation what it is, including the work of one of the greatest American artists of the 19th century. Winslow Homer lived by the sea, got to know its people, and indelibly captured the essence of the vast oceanic forces that influenced every American of his time.

In an exhibit built around the painter’s most famous work, the Philadelphia Museum of Art brings this world back to life with “Shipwreck! Winslow Homer and ‘The Life Line’ ” through Dec. 16 in the Perelman Building.

The ship-sinking storm at sea was “the nightmare that lies in the minds of Americans in Winslow Homer’s lifetime,” says Kathleen A. Foster, exhibit curator and author of its companion catalog.

The aftermath of such storms was a popular subject for artists starting with the rise of long-distance sea travel in the 17th century. Painters poured their hearts into images of furiously foaming seas, storm clouds and lightning, vessels crushed against craggy rocks, helpless people clinging to ship rigging and anguished onlookers.

The 19th-century art-viewing public responded in kind. “They loved to weep in front of paintings,” says Foster. To give modern viewers a taste of this, she included copious works, by Homer and others, organized into sections such as “Hope and Heartache.”

Grim subjects had grim titles, such as “The Body of Virginia Found in the Sand” by George T. Devereux, “The Last Breath” by Jozef Israëls, Homer’s “Forebodings” and “And the Harbor Bar is Moaning” by Thomas Hovenden.

Such words did not overstate the case. Ships regularly foundered with great loss of life, a subject Homer and his peers could not ignore (though his early sea studies were sunny, pleasant images of fashionable travel).

In 1873, an immigrant ship, the Atlantic, went down in “the greatest tragedy in the North Atlantic until the Titanic,” says Foster. Two-thirds of the ship’s 900 passengers perished, including “every single woman on board, and every single child, except one,” she says.

Inevitably, the bodies of women began to wash up on shore, a subject Homer covered in an illustration for Harper’s Weekly titled “The Wreck of the Atlantic — Cast Up by the Sea.”

Homer took inspiration from an illustration for “The Wreck of the Hesperus,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem about an earlier maritime disaster, depicting his drowned lady’s hands frozen as though still trying to clutch rigging she was not strong enough to hold onto.

“He actually was quoting from this (illustration),” says Foster. “He wanted people to remember ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’ ”

It was a brutal reminder that getting off a sinking ship in a freezing ocean required muscles, or help from somebody who had them.

After two more deadly shipwrecks, the U.S. government established lifesaving stations along the East Coast, after which the news media of the day, and the visual narrative, began to concentrate on the heroics of professional members of the lifesaving service.

Works on view set the stage for Homer’s triumphant “The Life Line” of 1884, which put the painter in the American art pantheon — and, incidentally, was snapped up by collector Catharine Lorillard Wolfe the first day it was exhibited.

In its fast-moving, high-stakes subject matter, emotional content and visual excitement, “The Life Line” connects the dangerous, real-life past to any scene involving firefighters on 9/11 or, for that matter, any action film you can name.

The work portrays an unconscious woman draped across a burly lifesaver who is strapped into a flotation device hanging from a stout pulley sliding along a taut rope. The ocean roars around them as tiny figures watch from the top of a cliff.

Unlike panoramic shipwreck paintings that preceded it, “The Life Line” is about the immediacy of the moment between two human beings caught amid thundering forces that could engulf them at any time.

Homer focused on the slide to safety, concentrating on the two figures, the thin rope and the murderous waves lapping at the rescuer’s feet. “The painting was so simplified. That’s its modernity,” says Foster.

In a visual tradition that had been developing for many years, the hero is big and strong, the woman weak, pale and passive, her soaked dress clinging to her body. Foster points out how carefully Homer deployed the power inherent in the image of such an embrace.

The rescuer clutches the woman tightly, his arm across her body, his hand just under her breast; the painter ups the sensation factor by ripping open her skirt at the knees to allow a glimpse of bare skin and white petticoat.

“That thrilled people, it was terrifically intimate,” says Foster. “This was a very sexy picture for 1884.”

The woman’s scarf is red, an artistic convention Foster called “the color of rescue, the color of danger, the color of excitement,” and, tellingly, the fabric billows over the face of the lifeguard.

“The mysterious rescuer — we love that idea. Like the Lone Ranger, ‘Who was that masked man?’ ” says Foster.

For all the latent emotion of the scene, Homer’s rescuer is similarly straightforward, “being as businesslike as possible,” says the curator.

“The Life Line” changed Homer’s life and career. He was fairly well-established as a painter by the time it appeared, having paid his dues as an illustrator and a Civil War battlefield artist for Harper’s Weekly, later traveling and exhibiting in France.

During what Foster describes as a “midlife crisis,” Homer moved to England in 1881and lived near the North Sea for about a year, where “he was confronted by the struggle of these fishing villages,” according to Foster.

He returned to America, his artistic vision profoundly changed. Gone were the sunny sketches of smooth seas and level decks, of pretty girls perched on yacht rigging. Homer was ready for his closeup.

“The Life Line” was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and was widely reproduced. “It was famous from the day it went on view,” says Foster.

After “The Life Line,” Homer’s family, aware of his sudden historical importance, began saving his letters.

In later years, the painter continued to depict the dangers and majesty of the sea for their own sake. As the churning forces of waves and rocks began to dominate his canvases, rather than humans, Homer solidified his reputation as “our greatest marine painter,” says Foster.

The exhibit’s arrangement employs a false-wall structure meant to suggest the sunny eye of a hurricane, surrounded by somber, dark walls that emanate a stormy feel, all hung with scenes of romantically rendered disasters at sea.

Foster brought together numerous works from the museum’s own holdings, and borrowed others, to give a broad art-historical perspective on the shipwreck tradition that, as far as this show is concerned, culminated in Homer’s masterpiece.

The museum is putting its money where its mouth is, offering free admission to first responders through Sunday. Police, firefighters, emergency services workers, members of the Coast Guard and others must present identification at the front desk.

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The Perelman Building is on Pennsylvania Avenue, across from the main museum. Free tram service is offered between the buildings every 10 to 15 minutes.

Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday (closed Christmas and Thanksgiving). Admission prices good for two consecutive days are $20, $18 for those 65 and older, $14 for those 13 through 18 and students with ID, and free to those 12 and younger. Tickets also include admission to the main building and the Rodin Museum.

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